‘Go for it’
Fans too are often used to living in hope, however forlorn, for their team or favourite athlete to win, sometimes for years or a lifetime, but it doesn’t stop them.
There is always too, a kind of ‘go for it’ mentality that celebrates simply trying. Companies have been quick to exploit that sense, aligning themselves with its indomitable spirit to sell more stuff with feel-good slogans like ‘just do it’, and ‘impossible is nothing’ (it’s not, of course, according to the laws of thermodynamics impossible is very much something).
And, indeed, some of the brightest glimmers of hope in recent years scarred by upheaval, war, pandemic, and division have come from sport.
Taking the knee, wearing the rainbow and calling out child food poverty are all ways in which sportspeople have driven awareness of prejudice and injustice, and pushed social progress.
Sportswash
But the opposite is also true. At the elite level especially, sport has allowed itself to be a billboard for corrosive commerce, promoting everything from junk food to gambling.
Violent regimes with appalling human rights records are allowed, brazenly, to use teams and events that command some of the biggest media audiences in the world to ‘sportswash’ their reputations. Top level sport itself has become the favoured public relations cloak of those who have the most to hide.
You can argue that this isn’t new. It’s true, tobacco companies were once one of sport’s most prominent sponsors.
But the glaring contradiction of healthy sporting activity being sponsored by an addictive product that kills led to widespread bans. So, much like a team changing tactics to overcome an obstacle or an opposition, we know that sport can adapt when it needs to. Is it asking too much?
Change – rapid transition – has never been more needed than now, with the frighteningly real prospect of losing, irretrievably, the climate that sport and all of us depend on.
Many things need to happen simultaneously. But one easy win would be for sport to stop being a billboard for the very climate polluters who are wrecking both the conditions it needs to survive, and the health of its athletes.
Oil like tobacco
Yet, it seems that in every direction, in almost every stadium, or on almost every team shirt there is a fossil fuel company, car maker or airline promoting highly polluting products and lifestyles – normalising behaviour that is pushing us over a climate cliff.
The good news is that voices are beginning to be raised against the practice.
Campaigners globally are calling on sport to drop dirty sponsors, from African civil society working for oil company Total to be dropped as sponsor of the Africa Cup of Nations, and internationally coordinated efforts to separate FIFA from the world’s biggest oil company Aramco, to fans of cycling, running, winter sports, a wave of activism is rising reminiscent of the uprising against big tobacco, but potentially even greater, given the supporter base of sport.
Groups are coming together and organising through alliances like the Cool Down sport for climate action network.
More than story
But, sport is much more than a story machine. It’s a place where new communities are created and established communities come together.
When Tahir Shams approached the historic athletics club Herne Hill Harriers in South London’s Tooting neighbourhood with the idea of creating a different kind of running club, open to who may never have run at all, nobody foresaw that within a year that hundreds of local people new to club running would weekly fill the athletics track and over a hundred each week join a social run around the nearby Common.
And, it wasn’t just that a lot of people were getting active, Tooting Run Club, as it became known, quickly won national awards for its outreach and creation of a free, supportive, nurturing community for the local area.
Tooting Run Club is a hyper local twist on other phenomenally successful sports initiatives like Parkrun, the volunteer organised, weekly, timed 5k runs in mostly urban green spaces.
Although some treat Parkrun like a competition, the appeal for many is social and its primary purpose was, and remains, not setting speed records, but bringing record numbers of people in a community together.
The benefits of sport for mental and general health are now so well appreciated that doctors’ surgeries increasingly prescribe sport to treat a wide range of conditions.
Nature contact
For many, sport is also one of the few ways that people might have any contact with nature. The drivers of modern living isolate us into bubbles of passive consumerism.
Sedentary lifestyles encouraged by car-biased transport systems that discourage walking and cycling, combine together with other modern addictions like screen time, fast food, home deliveries, and a long-hours, desk bound office culture.
Going for a run, a ride, an outdoor swim, a kickabout, football match or a tennis game may be among the few times that especially urban dwellers are reminded of the changing seasons, or touch grass, hear birdsong and be surrounded by trees.
Taking part in sport, put simply, is another way of being in the world, living a full, embodied life. It can tick all the boxes of the ‘five ways to well-being: being active, connecting, keeping learning, taking notice and sharing.
Sport does things to give you life-satisfaction that consumerism promises but fails to deliver. Local sport is exemplary in this regard, highlighting a tension with more global games.
Go local
Elite sport gets the vast majority of media attention, hype and money. Bold claims of ‘inspiring a generation’ and ‘legacy’ are common justifications for the public millions spent on elite events like the Olympic Games.
The problem is that the evidence does not support such claims of an elite ‘demonstration’ effect driving local participation. Post the London Olympics the heralded legacy of a new, motivated generation failed to materialise.
Partly this is due to underfunding at the local level, and a failure to create the infrastructure needed, but also it is perhaps due to a more fundamental misunderstanding: a mismatch between the assumptions of elite sports’ administrators and governing bodies and the practical realities of what people actually seek and can gain from sport, and how they go about it.
To get people running or walking around their local park at 9am on a Saturday morning, the promise of social contact, camaraderie, feedback, a sense of improving and belonging are key ingredients to the success of something like parkrun. Far fewer are likely motivated to get out of bed thinking they might emulate a distant Olympic gold medalist.
Imbalance
There seems to be a great imbalance in which the big bets to promote public benefit from sport are placed on the demonstration effect of the elite and international level. As if the sweat dripping from remote, hero-worshipped medal winners falls in magic drops to inspire all it touches.
Whereas it tends to be the less glamorous, poorly funded, local level which, against the odds, has the track record of success. That doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong in enjoying the performance of elite athletes, it’s just that if you want to widen and democratise the many benefits of sport, you need to look elsewhere, invest differently and create a more fertile soil at the grassroots. Otherwise that brilliant sweat falls on stony ground.
As many in Sporting Tales argue, the pendulum has swung too far in favour of elite sport. Now, for the wide range of human benefits, and a more ecologically viable model for sport, it needs to swing back to the local.
Their views are backed by the likes of Financial Times columnist and author of Soccernomics, Simon Kuper, who argues that our approach to sport is ‘upside-down’.
“Why have we created a country that obsesses about Olympic medals, about the Premier League, about the England football manager, and yet nearly half the population gets no exercise at all. And most kids who want to be the next Vicky Pemberton (Olympic gold medal winning cyclist) or Wayne Rooney (England footballer) will never even get the chance to try.”
Paralympian Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson, added: “Unless we look more creatively about how we engage everyone in physical activity, we may win medals but we will be bottom of the league table on health and wellbeing.”
Green havens
The urban green spaces set aside for local sport (think of all the school playing fields tragically sold off for speculative developments), and sports’ physical infrastructure of community spaces to gather, play another potentially life saving role in an era of global heating.
Towns and cities with more trees and green spaces are less vulnerable to extreme weather events, whether those might be heat waves or heavy rainfall.
Too many hard, paved surfaces in urban areas create a ‘heat island’ effect, hotspots that are lethal to more vulnerable people.
They reduce the ability for rainfall to be safely absorbed, exacerbating run-off and the likelihood of flooding as drainage systems become overwhelmed by sudden inundations.
Resilience
As the public sphere in some countries like the UK has been heavily eroded over recent decades through privatisations, selling off public land and buildings, gated developments and the loss of school fields – local sports clubs provide a vital buffer.
As networks of civil society, they are havens that not only deliver on their primary purpose of giving opportunities to participate in sport but are important community assets in times of need when public gathering spaces are needed.
Where do people go when the flood comes or a wildfire levels their home? Usually it is the nearest school or sports hall. With society so widely unprepared for the worsening impacts of global heating these local infrastructure will be key to resilience – not just for shelter, but the networks and relationships they create and maintain within local areas.
A large and growing literature also points to both the huge mental health benefits of access to green space, and the great inequality of access to it. Increasing green urban spaces that can double as places for physical exercise can help dramatically improve physical and mental health.
Sport has vast potential to make lives better, but it can just as easily be harnessed for more toxic ends.
Colonial history
It is easy to forget that for all its pious veneration of sporting ideals, the modern Olympics was built on foundations that gloried in colonial domination, were explicitly sexist, divisive and class-based. Women and working class people were banned from its ‘amateur’ competition (the latter, extraordinarily, because their working lives involved physical labour that was paid).
Its apparently ancient rituals are almost entirely modern inventions, from the torch procession infamously bequeathed by the Nazi’s 1936 Olympics, to the podium, medals, and flag ceremonies.
Today the Olympics might be stained by the sponsorship of major polluters, like in Paris 2024 the car company Toyota and airline Air France, both examples of industries that not only are major emitters of climate pollution, but who consistently obstruct and avoid climate action.
As reported here recently, just three of its sponsorship deals will produce more pollution than eight coal plants running for an entire year. In the run up to Paris news emerged that Toyota’s reportedly huge, and much criticised, $835 million Olympic deal might finally be ending.
Changing story
Yet the very fact that the event has moved on from some of its historical wrongs shows that change is possible.
The challenge to this and other big global sporting competitions is to be on the side of life and a future for humanity.
At the moment leadership is lacking in other major sports governance bodies, such as FIFA who offer themselves as billboards for some of the world’s worst polluters, and are changing the game in ways that seem almost designed to maximise their damage – with bigger competitions spread across continents. New visions are needed and, in a very small way, this book hopefully adds something.
Joy
If a single, very personal, image can capture the essence of what sport can bring, for me it is caught in a photograph of my daughter, Scarlett, aged five, running across the long, dreary raised pedestrian walkway over the platforms of Clapham Junction railway station in London.
A late winter sun casts dramatic, long shadows on the ground. She is running fast towards me, so fast that in the picture she is blurred and almost bursts out of the frame.
Exploding with joy, behind her there is a shrinking perspective of shadows that stretch into the distance. I look at this picture and experience a rush of thoughts: that we are born to run, that sport is just another word for play and can happen anywhere, that it is a celebration of life and a beautiful way to be in the world, and that this is one of the best stories sport can tell.
This Author
Andrew Simms is co-director of the New Weather Institute, assistant director of Scientists for Global Responsibility, co-founder of the Badvertising campaign, coordinator of the Rapid Transition Alliance, an author on new and green economics, and co-author of the original Green New Deal. Follow on X: @AndrewSimms_uk or Mastodon: @andrewsimms@indieweb.social.
This article is adapted from the introduction to Sporting Tales – 21 new stories for a troubled world, with contributions from Olympians Etienne Stott and Laura Baldwin, elite athletes Verity Ockenden and Damian Hall, leading sports writers Matt Rendell and David Goldblatt and many more. Sporting Tales is available here. Find out more about Cool Down – the sport for climate action network.
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